Page 2 of Offensive Edge
Theo loved his mom, but he knew he wasn’t getting a fancy new watch. It was expensive enough for her to even be there for the draft.
“Ready, Teddy?” Rowan asked him. No one ever called him Teddy, except for Rowan when he was feeling especially soft for Theo. With how raw his heart felt in the moment, it was a knife to his chest.
Theo needed to hold it together. If he cried like he wanted to, his eyes would be red for the rest of the night.
“Yeah,” Theo lied. They had to head down the street to the Xcel Energy Center. The Minnesota Northern Lights were hosting the draft this year. Theo was disappointed it wasn’t in Florida, but he just wanted to be as far away from what he was feeling as possible, and his feelings were currently in the Midwest.
Rowan pulled him into a big hug, and kissed him, his body as familiar against Theo as his own body was. Fuck, he would miss this.
“I love you,” Rowan said, holding Theo’s face close to his. Another atypical admission of feelings.
All Theo could do was respond in kind. And then they left, their hotel room door shutting with a definitive click. Time was moving forward inexorably, no matter how badly Theo wanted to freeze them into being Jaguars forever.
He could already feel the fault lines forming on his heart. There would be no escaping how badly this was going to hurt.
CHAPTER1
THEO
FALL 2022
Theo threwhis phone across the room when the notification came in.
ROWAN FOLEY SIGNS SEVEN-YEAR DEAL WITH THE SAN JOSE SERPENTS.
Fuck, he thought. “Fuck,” he shouted, curling into the kitchen table chair in his mom’s apartment in Oregon.
“What now?” Michelle McCann asked her child from the kitchen, where she was pouring ingredients into a KitchenAid mixer, ready to make a big batch of chocolate chip cookies for her kid to take with him to San Jose when he reported for duty. “Don’t say Rowan.”
Theo winced. There was a rumor Rowan wasn’t signing with Texas again, and instead was shopping around with a handful of teams. Theo had been stewing on it, praying Rowan would go back home to Calgary, or maybe sign in Las Vegas, where the rumors were especially strong. New York would be good, too. It would be great to have him in a different conference.
Now, Theo had him on the same fucking team.
“He signed to the Serpents.”
“Oh, honey.” She turned the beater on the mixer off and grabbed a couple of beers out of her fridge. It was four o’clock. They could have a beer. She sat next to her son, who was hunched over the kitchen table, shoulders round in defeat. She gave him a little back scratch. “You really don’t think that it will be nice to play with him again?”
“Playing with him isn’t really my concern.” What happened on the ice was separate, and he would be an idiot to complain about having the best player in the league—possibly ever—on his team. Potentially on his wing. He could deal with Rowan if they only ever hopped over the boards at the same time. Unfortunately, players spent way more time together off the ice than on it.
“It’s been eight years, honey.”
“And I’ve spent every one of them trying to establish my own career, separate from him. And I thought I’d finally managed that in San Jose. I don’t get why he would sign here. He knows I’m here.”
“He does. Maybe he just wants to play with you again.”
“Or he wants to be on a team that’s a contender this year.” Theo was finally playing good hockey on a good team. Couldn’t he just have this to himself?
“Or both.”
“I don’t know what to do. It’s going to be so fucking awkward.”
“You can’t just be friends again?”
“We were neverjust friends,” Theo said. His mom knew the depth of his relationship with Rowan. How it had absolutely destroyed him when Rowan stopped talking to him.
“I know, baby. Maybe it’s time to figure out how to be just friends.”
“I don’t want to be his friend.” Rowan had shattered his heart into so many pieces that it had never healed back into a solid shape. It was still in fragments. “I don’t want to listen to him talk about all his fucking awards, and all his records—”
